** A Richard & Judy Book Club Pick **
People like Emmy Jackson. They always have. Especially online, where she is Instagram sensation Mamabare, famous for telling the unvarnished truth about modern parenthood.
But Emmy isn’t as honest as she’d like the fans to believe. She may think she has her followers fooled, but someone out there knows the truth and plans to make her pay . . .
A smart and thrilling debut that delves into the darkest aspects of influencer culture, Ellery Lloyd’s People Like Her is about what you risk losing when you don’t know who’s watching . . .
Turn the page to read an extract now . . .
Prologue
I think it is possible that I am dying.
For quite some time now, in any case, it has felt like I have been watching as my life scrolls past in front of my eyes.
My earliest memory: it is winter, sometime in the early 1980s. I am wearing mittens, a badly knitted hat and an enormous red coat. My mother is pulling me across our back lawn on a blue plastic sledge. Her smile is fixed. I look completely frozen. I can remember how cold my hands were in those mittens, the way every dip and bump of the ground felt through the sledge, the creak of the snow beneath her boots.
My first day at school. I am swinging a brown leather satchel with my name written on a card peeking out from a small plastic window. EMMELINE. One navy knee sock is bunched around my ankle; my hair is in pigtails of slightly unequal length.
Me and Polly at twelve years old. We are having a sleepover at her house, already in our tartan pyjamas, wearing mudpacks and waiting for our corn to pop in the microwave. The two of us in her hallway, slightly older, ready to go to the Halloween party where I had my first kiss. Polly was a pumpkin. I was a sexy cat. Us again, on a summer’s day, sitting cross-legged in our jeans and Doc Martens in a field of stubble. In spaghetti-strap dresses and chokers, ready for our sixth-form leavers’ ball. Memory after memory, one after another, until I find myself starting to wonder whether I can call to mind a single emotionally significant scene from my teenage years in which Polly does not feature, with her lopsided smile and her awkward posing.
Only as I am thinking this do I realise what a sad thought it is now.
My early twenties are something of a blur. Work. Parties. Pubs. Picnics. Holidays. To be honest, my late twenties and early thirties are a bit fuzzy around the edges as well.
There are some things I’ll never forget.
Me and Dan in a photo booth, on our third or fourth date. I have my arm around his shoulders. Dan looks incredibly handsome. I look absolutely smitten. We are both grinning like fools.
Our wedding day. The little wink I’m giving to a friend behind the camera as we are saying our vows, Dan’s face solemn as he places the ring on my finger.
Our honeymoon, the pair of us blissed out and sunburned in a bar on a Bali beach at sunset.
Sometimes it is hard to believe we were ever that young, that happy, that innocent.
The moment that Coco was born, furious and screaming, whitish and snotty with vernix. Scored into my memory forever, that first glimpse of her little squished face. That moment they passed her to me. The weight of our feelings.
Coco, covered in confetti from a pi?ata, laughing, at her fourth birthday party.
My son, Bear, a fortnight old, too small even for the tiny sleepsuit he is wearing, cradled in the arms of his beaming sister.
Only now does it dawn on me that what I am seeing are not actual memories but memories of photographs. Whole days boiled down to a single static image. Whole relationships. Whole eras.
And still they keep on coming. These fragments. These snapshots. One after another after another. Tumbling faster and faster through my brain.
Bear screaming in his carrier.